BACKGROUND

I love the game. LOVE it. I have put countless hours into it, mostly while on holiday. When most people were sunning themselves, I was sat in a beachside cafe angry that my first round RB wasn’t having the impact I had expected on the run game.

And I'm not the only one. Retro Bowl is an 8 bit styled American football video game developed by New Star Games for the iOS and Android. It was released in 2020 and hit the top of the charts by 2021. It's subreddit has over 66,000 members (who totally sorted me out by the way - more on that later).

I skimmed through posts on that Reddit and the game's Discord to see what features the users were asking for and the top one by a long way was defence, so, my assumption was that this would be backed up by my research.

I was also really aware of the love the community had for the game and not wanting any update to jeopardise that, so I decided to focus my research in two areas - what features the users wanted added, and what they loved about the game already.

RESEARCH

Goals:

Find out what devices the users are accessing the game on
Understand why they play/love the game
Understand what feature they most want added
Understand what pain points adding new features may cause

Methods:

User Interviews
Surveys
Competitive Analysis

Now this is where the Retro Bowl community came up huge for me. I got 627 survey responses and 6 interviews (thank you!) so could be pretty confident my results were solid and reflected the user community's thoughts.

Results:

The users had a strong opinion that retro Bowl 'had no cash grabiness to it’ and its lack of monetisation was ‘a huge deal’ so not changing that about the game will be important. Not making it pay to win was raised by multiple users and ‘don’t squeeze the players for money, that will put me off’ said one interviewee.

Almost all of the users interviewed said the simplicity of the game was a large part of why they liked it, and this was backed up by the survey data with simplicity of gameplay being the aspect most loved about the game (59.7%).

Interestingly, and different to my early assumptions, the feature most wanted added to the game was to make the offence adaptable by selecting play designs (29.3%), adding defence to the game came a close second (24.2%).

DEFINE

Findings after Research:

Users liked that the game was not pay to win
Users loved the simplicity of the game (compared to other mobile games like Madden)
Users wanted new attack routes and variety in attack added to the game
Users wanted defence added, but some were wary of disrupting the flow of the game or making it too complicated
People used the app almost exclusively on mobile

Based on this I created How Might We statements for the site:

How might we best add play design in a simple way?
How might we add to the game without harming what users already like about it?
How might we allow users to have more control over the game and its outcome to enhance enjoyment?

I divided the users into two user personas:

DESIGN

Sitemapping, User Flow and Task Flow:

I now knew what they users wanted but had to come up with the best and simplest way of adding this to the game.

As the requests for the features Play Design and adding Defence to the game were so close I decided to add both features.

With these features I had a lot to decide:

Do players select before game or change in game? Do I add it to the existing audible option? Should they be able to change at half time?

At the front on my mind was what the research had told me - simplicity is key.

As there were 22 options of play designs I had to decide how to limit them down and how to display them.

I decided upon giving the user 4 attacking options:

2WR 2RB

2WR 1TE 1RB (as the game has as default)

3WR 1RB

2WR 2TE

I added the option to change this at two points in the game - on the roster screen (pre game), and on the game screen (mid game)

Rather than adding defence to the game in a huge way and disrupting it's simplicity, I decided to add defensive options:

AGGRESSIVE - Bigger chance of interceptions and forcing fumbles, but also bigger chance of large plays against you
REGULAR - Carry on as usual
CAUTIOUS - May give short yards away but protect against longer throws and runs

I added this option to the same screens to allow users to change these tactics pre game and after a turnover.

Wireframing

I first took time to carefully analyse the design system of the game, so my additions fitted in seamlessly.

I went straight from sketching the wireframes to high fidelity as I was adding to the screen that already existed, there was no need for mid fidelity wireframes with this task.

I decided to adapt screens that were already in the game rather than creating whole new ones the user would not be used to.

Testing

I did 3 rounds of moderated usability testing with Maze.

Results

The first flow I tested was to read about the new features I had added in the game’s info page. This had a low success rate and on discussing with the users they said they never used the game info page and got new information on updates from a pop up when they opened the game.

I retested with this pop up instead and it had a 100% success rate, as was to be expected.

I tested the users on changing their starting defensive tactics and this had a success rate of 56% but an SEQ score of 6.1 for those who did complete. I asked the users what the reason for the low success rate was and they said they were not used to the word ‘cautious’ when talking about football tactics. I changed the name of the defensive tactic to ‘Conservative’ as this was a term more regularly used in football. I retested with this and it produced a much better 82% success rate and an SEQ of 6.2.

I tested changing the team’s starting play design and this had a success rate of 100% and an SEQ of 7.

I tested changing the team’s defensive tactics mid game and it had a success rate of 85.7% and an SEQ of 6.7.

I then tested changing play design systems mid game and this had a success rate of 92.9% and an SEQ of 6.9.

Changes after testing:

CONCLUSION

I loved doing this project, 1) because I love the game myself and 2) because the r/retrobowl community gave me such great research to work from.

I felt a real responsibility to adapt the game to what they wanted and was delighted they were happy with the results.

For me, this project absolutely reinforced to me the crucial importance of simplicity. It is at the core of everything in UX - solve the problem in the simplest way possible for the user.

I love working within gaming and with other gaming fans and hope this is something I can engage with again in the future.

Next steps

If I was to continue working on the project I would like to test and get user feedback to check that the new features maintain the game's simplicity (one of the things the users love about the game) and add to the user experience. I would also like to test the icons that were made and see if any improvements are needed with them, or if they work as they are. I think adding features to a game like this, which's strength is how easy it is to pick up and play, means continual testing and engaging with the user base to ensure any new features add to the game, rather than detract - another important lesson to hold on to moving forward.